An Unfamiliar Instant
by hushedgreylily
Summary: Post-Fallen Kingdom. Claire and Owen cling to each other in the unfamiliar new world they've found themselves in, with a terrified child and no idea what's going to happen next. Oneshot. Clawen.


**AN UNFAMILIAR INSTANT**

 **So, after a Fallen Kingdom rewatch, I present you with the straight-after-the-movie oneshot I've been going to give you guys since I first saw it! Clawen, of course. A little smut, of course. Plenty of angst, of course.**

 **Disclaimer: Still doesn't belong to me, never has done, never will do.**

After they come out of the hospital, she gets in the back of the car and lets Maisie rest her head against her shoulder, without even thinking. She can only begin to imagine how tired the child is – it feels like she hasn't slept in forever, and though she spent the first four months after the Jurassic World incident not sleeping, laying entwined in an always blissfully sleeping Owen, trying her hardest to stop hearing the screams, to stop the regret knotting in her belly, this is a different kind of exhaustion. This is pure, unbridled, and somehow darker. Not just her brain and her conscience and all that _guilt_ refusing to let her sleep, this feels like every muscle in her body is about to give way, that any of her joints could fail any moment, like she's falling apart. Like she's a battery constantly on its last few seconds of charge, the device already operating sub-par. So she can't imagine how a child's coping.

Once they'd found and Owen had started the car, he'd insisted on driving as far as he possibly could, and she hadn't had the energy in her to protest. He fed her something about finding her a hospital to look at her leg but far enough out to have not heard about the incident yet, so she could be quickly treated and they could find somewhere to set up base. She'd just nodded, Maisie's hand in hers shaking, feeling her own body quivering.

She's not sure how many hours they'd driven for, before Owen had found them a small, quiet town, and a little hospital, and she'd felt them something about her next door neighbour's guard dog attacking her. The doctor had looked bored enough not to ask her any questions, and the kindly young nurse had debrided, soaked and stitched the wound, giving her a week long course of antibiotics and a kindly smile as she hobbled out of the room, one hand in Owen's, one hand still wrapped around the little girl's.

The pain in her leg hadn't hit her until they'd been a few miles down the road. She'd been half dozing in the passenger seat – she'd promised Owen she wouldn't, but it had been out of her control and the first time she'd closed her eyes he'd laughed at her and squeezed her hand and promised he was running on such an adrenaline high he didn't think he would fall asleep for weeks, let alone at the wheel – and a sharp shooting pain had suddenly started zipping through her leg and not stopping, like a hideous repeating frame stuck on the moment it had happened in the exhibit.

At her uncontrollable whimper, Owen had turned to her, worry etching lines on his face.

For moments, she hadn't been able to get any words out. She couldn't work out if she felt like she wanted to amputate her entire leg or just die completely, but she knew she couldn't hold out like this for much longer. Owen, ever the practical, prepared soldier, had torn one of the pocket fronts off his trousers, and given it to her, folded, to bite, and told her to keep breathing, squeezing her other thigh lightly, comfortingly as he turned his hands and his eyes back to the deserted road.

She thinks probably after that she passed out from the pain, because the rest of her recollections of the journey are broken, haphazard, fleeting. But now, as she tucks her arm around Maisie, dosed probably up to the eyeballs on painkillers, rehydrated and with the first days worth of antibiotics flowing through her system, giving some sort of comfort, she feels like she'll survive. Even the memories of the pain don't echo as loudly as she thought they might, and there's something reassuring about the child's head on her shoulder, the soft hair against her skin. Owen looks at them both in the rearview mirror and smiles, and for the first time since this all began again, it reaches his eyes. He notices Maisie's eyes drifting closed.

"There's a motel a few miles out, the nurse told me. I'll get us there."

She manages to give him a half smile as she instinctually turns her head slightly and presses her lips against the little girl's head. She feels the girl stiffen slightly against her before relaxing, and when she looks up, although Owen's eyes are back on the road, she's sure they're a little _damper_ than they were previously, and she reads his hard swallow and the set of his jaw like she'd never left his side. He's got emotions buried in there somewhere about all of this he's going to have to deal with at some point, and knowing the man perhaps better than anyone else, she knows they sooner she can help him drag them to the surface, the less explosive they will be.

He pulls into the motel car park and lifts a dozing Maisie out of her arms, giving her hand a tight squeeze as his passes. Unsaid things echo between them, but in that moment she barely has the energy to ease herself out of the back of the car and walk with him into the motel lobby.

She manages to get them a family suite and as they limp and heave up the stairs, his hand finds its' old haunt at the small of her back, and her breath hitches, if only for a moment. He seems to realise the error of his ways and pulls it away after just a second, but she gives him a slightly wider smile as they let themselves into the rooms, and she hopes he reads into it.

He sets Maisie down on the little single bed, and absent-mindedly strokes hair away from her face. For a moment, she freezes. Because he looks like he fits, like this is always where he'd been meant to be, and suddenly, against her better judgement, maybe, and she tells herself she wouldn't be thinking it if she hadn't been awake for approximately the last 72 hours, she hopes to high heaven that she fits into that picture with both of them. The little girl they found as everything exploded, and the man she'd already proven to herself once she couldn't fit with. She'd always half prided herself on not wanting children, or certainly not wanting children for a very long time, but suddenly, this picture in their new disaster is the only thing that rings true.

But she supposes she's living in a world she doesn't know anymore, so maybe that's to be expected.

"We haven't eaten in what feels like a week." Owen mutters. "And it's not late… we should have something to keep our strength up… I saw a supermarket not far from that crossroads, a few miles back… I'll get us some supplies…"

Her heart's choking in her mouth, suddenly, because she doesn't want him out of her sight, certainly not in this new world laced with danger, and she feels like if he leaves her for one moment, she might crumble. She might fall apart into pieces too small to ever put back together.

"I-" she starts, but the words die on her tongue, and, a tiny smile on his face, he steps towards her.

"If that's ok with you." He breathes, almost indiscernibly, because he knows her well enough to read all the tells in her face as much as she can.

She looks down, but he brings a hand to under her chin, tilting her eyes up to meet his. "I'll be fine, Claire, and I won't be long. And you need to be there for Maisie."

She darts her head to look at Maisie, curled up against the wall on the little bed. She doesn't get to be the one that falls apart, not now, maybe not ever, because she's sure to have to start piecing the little girl back together sometime soon.

"Be careful." She breathes, and it's almost an echo of earlier, when he was joking with her, when they were still bickering and pretending they weren't really anything to each other anymore, before hell came crashing around them (again) and they'd found themselves clinging to each other to stay afloat.

She's sure his eyes flicker down to her lips for a moment, as if he's got a thousand goodbyes he wants to give her, but maybe she's hallucinating, with the adrenaline, and the morphine, and the sheer exhaustion. He settles for squeezing her hand tightly as he pulls away, and rushing out of the door as if he can't quite bring himself to leave her, either.

She sits on the mattress beside Maisie, lifting a blanket from the end of the bed and pulling it over the child, gently stroking her hair for a second in a mirror image of Owen when he set her down.

Eyelids flicker and wide eyes stare up at her, fear and apprehension and doubt dancing behind them.

"Claire?" Maisie whispers, "Where are we?"

She forces the widest smile onto her face. "We found somewhere to sleep. We need some rest before we can think about doing anything else…"

Maisie nods, as if Claire's answer is sufficient, but then worry crosses her features. "What happened to Owen?"

The smile on Claire's face is bordering on genuine with that. "He's gone to get us some food, so we can have something to eat, and that'll make us feel better and stronger. He won't be long."

Maisie bites her lip. "He'll definitely be back?"

"I promise." Claire breathes, and she sounds so much more confident than she feels, because suddenly she's looking into the eyes of a child who has lost everyone she held dear, had her whole world crumble around her, and her identity re-evaluated, all in a matter of hours.

"Ok." Maisie half lisps, her eyelids drooping again. "And you'll both be here when I wake up?"

Claire gives the little girl's hand a tight squeeze, and presses a light kiss to her forehead. "Of course we will. Sleeping right over there in the other room. You're one of us, now."

As her heavy eyelids set closed and her breathing turns steadier with sleep, Maisie's mouth turns into a slight smile.

Claire marvels when she's certain the child is asleep, because surely everything she's seen in the last hours is the stuff of unimaginable nightmares, and sleep certainly shouldn't be this easy. She supposes, however, complete exhaustion will always win that battle.

She sits holding Maisie's hand, gently stroking the skin, for an indeterminate amount of time, until Owen steps through the door and she can't help the relief rushing through every inch of her, and the almost reflexive movement that takes her across the room and wraps her arms around him before she's even had a chance to think.

Looking at the sleeping girl and the wide smile on Claire's face, he gives that low rumbling laugh she thinks might be what she fell in love with in the first place. "I couldn't even get blueberry muffins, Claire, and that's how you thank me?"

She could kiss him, then, for remembering her favourite type of muffin after everything, after a whole new reality crashing around them. But she doesn't, because suddenly she has no idea what he is to her anymore, or what she is to him, and for maybe the first time in this whole disastrous event, that bothers her. For the first time, or the first time she's allowed herself to think about it, that's not enough.

He takes two of the chocolate chip muffins out of the shopping bag and hands one to her, that boyish grin that completely masks everything he's seen on his face again, and laughs when she stares at it for a moment as if she can't work out what to do with it.

"I suggest you take a bite, Claire. That would be the first step." He's still whispering, and Maisie's still sleeping soundly in the corner, and she half laughs and nods towards the other room.

"Shall we go to bed?" she whispers, and he takes her hand as she leads him through.

She takes a bite of the muffin, and then another one to give it another chance, but it tastes of cardboard and her body doesn't feel like it can tolerate it right now, so she sets it down on the rickety looking dressing table as Owen pulls his pants off and slips his shirt over his head, sliding under the covers. She eases her own pants over her hips with hardly a second thought – she'd woken up not many hours earlier with her hand on his chest anyway, and slides her bra out down her sleeve. As she walks towards the bed, despite being in nothing but a worn khaki tank top, a white pair of panties, and an almost disconcertingly white leg bandage, suddenly she couldn't feel any safer anywhere in this world. There's a comforting familiarity to joining Owen in bed that she's both been missing and didn't realise she needed. She slips under the covers and doesn't put up anything of a fight as he seems to take a deep breath and pull her against him, as he lies on his back. A tiny smile touches her lips as without even thinking, her hand finds its comforting resting spot it was inhabiting earlier, against his chest, feeling his heartbeat.

"What happens now?" she whispers, and she sounds almost childlike. Something presses against the crown of her head, and she's sure it's his lips.

"Not a clue. We just get through tonight, and we wake up in the morning, and we go from there…"

She looks up at him, giving him a little, almost bitter, smile. "You know I've never liked living like that."

She feels the hand from the arm that tugged her towards him rest itself on her hip bone. She draws in a quick, shallow breath, because despite _everything_ , the exhaustion, the injuries, the state of the entire world right now, Owen Grady has an effect on her. He always has, she suspects it's some kind of biological reaction, completely out of her control.

"That little girl…"

"We won't let any harm come to her. We'll keep her safe."

All these 'we's he's using make her heart swell a little. She tilts herself up and her hand finds his cheek, turning his face so his eyes can find nowhere else to fix but her own eyes.

"I let myself forget what you meant to me." She breathes, because if this has taught her anything, it's that there's no time to be wasted, no worth in leaving anything unsaid.

She watches him swallow and wills him to say something.

"I'm sorry." She whispers, and suddenly she doesn't want to meet his eyes anymore, they're so big and green and full of too many emotions to decode all at once. She shouldn't have said anything, she should have just laid there, being held by him, and thanked anyone who might be listening that he was still alive beside her…

"It nearly broke my heart all over again, leaving you bleeding in that exhibit to go find Maisie." He breathes, and this time, when her eyes lock with his, she's not sure whether she wants to laugh or cry or something else entirely. Because they're so full of regret, anger, sadness and something that's not dissimilar to love she's completely overwhelmed.

"You had to save her." She whispers, threading her fingers up into his hair, tentatively, with an old familiarity she didn't even realise she had.

His slight smile is somehow exasperated, as if she's driving him as mad as ever. "And I'd do it again a thousand times, Claire, because you asked me to, you begged me to…"

 _And you kissed me like nothing had ever gone wrong and we were right back where we started_ hangs unspoken in the air.

He takes a deep breath. "And I'd do it again for Maisie, now. Just in that moment, when I didn't know if I'd ever see you again, I-"

With the last words he's sounding a little choked and a thousand emotions are flitting across his features, and he suddenly looks lost and broken and more than anything she doesn't want him to keep looking so alone, and so she leans forward and kisses him, her fingers curling in his hair.

For no more than half a moment, he doesn't respond. She can almost feel the shock coursing through him and for one hideous instant she thinks maybe she's misread everything, his words, his glances, the feeling of his skin against hers, and she's going to end up spending the rest of the night curled up beside Maisie on that tiny single bed, until suddenly the fingers on her hip thread deliciously against her skin, his mouth opens, and his eyes close.

Within seconds he's on top of her, pinning her down against the mattress, and his lips are travelling down the column of her throat, along her collarbone, like they always used to, and she's so highly strung, and she's been denying herself this for so long, for intermittent moments she can't think about anything else and none of this has happened, there's not a little girl completely alone but for them in the next room, there's not dinosaurs roaming free, and she's being pushed down into the sheets in Owen Grady's bed three years and a lifetime ago, when they thought all the nightmares were over, and really they'd hardly begun.

She plans on being eternally grateful that they're in minimal clothing, he's only in a pair of grey boxers, because they're both running on empty and not quite lucid to reality, and she's not sure she could manage having to completely undress him, not today.

Almost every inch of his delicious skin is bare and pressed against her, as his mouth traces down further still, pushing one of her breasts up over the lip of her tank top, and his lips close around the suddenly hard nipple, sending fire running through her veins. All apart from the part of him she most wants revealed right now. She half whimpers against him as she slides a hand almost clumsily underneath the waistband of his underwear.

His hips thrust violently towards her and he curses against her skin, and a sudden moment of reality and sensibility crushes her a little.

"We have to be quiet." She whispers into the top of his head as she traces his length with delicate fingers, almost taunting him. "Maisie's fast asleep next door."

He half moans against her, teeth grazing her nipple lightly, but he seems to take it on board. Because as she brushes her thumb lightly over the head of his erection, he uses one of his hands to shove his boxers over his hips and down his legs, and the other to slide into her underwear, gently caressing to assess how wet she is.

He pulls his mouth up from her breast and hisses "Jesus, Claire." Into her ear before he pushes the tip of his finger inside her gently, his mouth finding the skin just below her ear that turns her legs to jelly. As she twines her fingers in his hair invitingly he slides his whole finger in, curling it slightly.

They've been awake what feels like forever and a day, and they're both somehow more broken that they were hours ago, so as he feels the faint promise of her muscles clenching around him, he draws his finger away and lines himself up with her, listening to her breath catch.

"Please." She half-whispers, as if she'd ever had to ask him, and he thrusts into her hard and fast, burying himself to the hilt with less grace than he'd usually pride himself on.

He stills for a moment, allowing her to adjust. She runs a finger along his cheekbone and he opens his eyes for a second, questions flooding him.

"Move." She hisses, a madness in her face for a moment, but he's happy to comply. He draws almost all the way out before slamming deep back inside her and suddenly everything's happening all at once. It's like she's choking, and there's a fire burning between her legs, and she's not sure why she ever let this man go, and with the world crumbling around them he's a completely insane ounce of sanity. She hooks her good leg up and around his waist, and in that moment, the angle change is enough, she feels her orgasm thundering towards her, and she's hardly had a chance to get started. She pulls his face roughly towards hers, crashing her lips against his, as she snakes her other hand down between her legs, her fingers brushing her clit once, twice, before she starts shuddering, clamping around him, her orgasm shooting to the ends of her fingers and toes like she hasn't felt in a long time.

He's not far behind her anyway, and that look on her face as she comes that he's missed so much is enough to finish him off. He pummels into her once more before she feels him spilling inside her, marking her again, almost claiming her back. She buries her head in his shoulder, biting the skin to quell her cries, and they both manage to collapse side by side having made very little noise.

She curls herself around him, pressing her lips against his bare skin before she feels a choke rise in her throat, if only for a moment.

"I forgot how wonderful that feels." She breathes, a sad half smile on her face. "I missed you more than I ever even let myself think."

Swallowing, he presses his lips against the bridge of her nose, twining his legs through hers, hand clasping her own. "Shhhhh." She feels his other hand stroking her hair. "Sleep, Claire."

His fingers are dancing soothing patterns both on the scalp and on her palm, and suddenly sleep does seem like the only option, despite everything they're not saying, despite the fact that they had fallen apart so dramatically the first time (though right now, she can't really remember why), despite the fact that the world is falling apart around them.

As her breathing slows, he lets a smile touch his lips. She's back in his arms, and until she remembers why it never worked in the first place and will probably always be a bad idea, he's not letting her go. Every level of reality he's ever known is crumbling, and suddenly the only thing that makes any sense anymore is curled around him, her leg between his legs and her fingers threaded through his.

And for now, he's going to have to hold onto that.

FIN

 **Would love to hear what you think of my first attempt to put something post-Fallen Kingdom out there! It's taken me far too long, I know, but it was always going to turn up eventually!**

 **And never fear, the third volume of my 60s AU series is in the works currently and will be with you soon enough!**


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